Transmedia Character Studies provides a range of methodological tools and foundational vocabulary for the analysis of characters across and between various forms of multimodal, interactive, and even non-narrative or non-fictional media.

This highly innovative work offers new perspectives on how to interrelate production discourses, media texts, and reception discourses, and how to select a suitable research corpus for the discussion of characters whose serial appearances stretch across years, decades, or even centuries. Each chapter starts from a different notion of how fictional characters can be considered, tracing character theories and models to approach character representations from perspectives developed in various disciplines and fields.

This book will enable graduate students and scholars of transmedia studies, film, television, comics studies, video game studies, popular culture studies, fandom studies, narratology, and creative industries to conduct comprehensive, media-conscious analyses of characters across a variety of media.

Tobias Kunz holds an MA in Cross-Media Culture from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He works as an editorial assistant for the peer-reviewed journal Connotations.

Lukas R.A. Wilde is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. His monograph Im Reich der Figuren (Kingdom of Characters) was awarded with the Roland Faelske for the best dissertation in Comics and Animation Studies 2018 as well as with the GIB Dissertation Award 2021 of the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Pictures (GiB). He is Vice President of the German Society for Comic Studies (ComFor).